That Moment

when you take a little step back and realize that every single one of your students is engaged in the activity--and it's one of your tougher classes.

Spanish II has been working on house vocabulary for the past week and change. Tomorrow is their quiz where they will have to write sentences about what each person/family needed based on a given scenario. Today to practice I broke them up into groups of approximately three kids (uneven numbers meant sometimes a group of four or two). Each group got a whiteboard and writing supplies. They then went to a link through a class website that gave a rundown of sentences describing different people's houses in English.

On a set of desks were 27 questions in Spanish based on those English sentences. Each group got one sentence and then worked together to write a Spanish response to that question on their whiteboard. When ready, they held the whiteboard up for me to check. If wrong, I gave them advice on how to fix it for another attempt. Once they got it right, they got a gold coin from me to put in their treasure chest and then they hurried to change their question out for a new one.

To get a question right, they had to utilize both a variety of vocabulary words (including some of the challenge ones I included in the unit) and correct grammar. They also had to work together as a team to try to get questions answered as quickly as possible (plus I required a different student to write each response).

Reflecting, I think I would love to try to get pictures to replace the English sentences or if not all of them, at least some of them. It would take some time to hunt down/make all the needed images, but it would require more attention to detail and deeper thinking to be successful.